A survey carried out in the UK in 2020 found that the most common type of stress experienced by Brits was work stress, with 79% saying they frequently felt this type of stress, and with a further 60% saying they often felt monetary stress, and 48% experienced family stress.
Left unchecked or ignored, stress can escalate and lead to sickness and ultimately time off, which will affect your productivity, career, or business. Not to mention the extent to which you appreciate and enjoy daily life!
This shows how important it is to not only recognise stress but to do something about it.
Having tools to manage stress will help you break the hold stress has on your life, so you can be happier, healthier, and more productive.
Many of us strive for a balanced life, with time for work, family, relationships, relaxation, and fun. We also need to build resilience to keep going when things get tough or we are thrown an unexpected curveball.
The top stressful areas in life are usually death, divorce, moving home, finances, and loosing a job.
Although these are not all strictly work related, they are all part of life, and can affect our working lives as well. If 2020 has shown us anything, it’s that work and life are not separate entities and the move towards leading from a person-centred approach highlights this even more so.
It’s important to recognise that we all experience stress differently and what one person finds stressful, another can thrive on.
For instance, you may love scrolling and engaging on social media, another person finds being in the online space too often really stressful.
You may thrive on meeting a tight deadline, someone else gets overwhelmed by that.
Maybe numbers make your heart sing but someone else gets sweaty just thinking about them.
Everyone reacts differently to situations and circumstances. What one person finds easy, another finds stressful. When in a state of stress, dealing with the issues causing it can feel overwhelming and impossible, but if we decide to, we can often resolve the problem.
Noticing that you are feeling stressed and deciding to do something about it will improve the quality of your life both at home and at work.
So, what makes people stressed at work?
There are many factors, some are working long hours, a heavy workload, job insecurity, conflicts with co-workers or bosses, taking on a new role or extra responsibility, or getting out of your comfort zone.
Stress often triggers our fight-or-flight response. This can be OK in the short term and can be useful to focus on a short term situation like doing well at an interview, presenting at a workshop, etc. as it’s proven that adrenalin can help performance in the short term…
However, staying in this space in the long term is bad for our health and our lives.
Stress can show up in a myriad of ways, including:
- Anger and irritability.
- Feeling overwhelmed, unmotivated, or unfocused.
- Not sleeping or sleeping too much.
- Memory or concentration problems.
- Making poor choices or decisions.
- Indecision.
However it may be showing up, you first have to recognise the symptoms before you can deal with them.
If you are feeling any of those symptoms, then take a look at the following tips. They will help!
1. Try to get to the bottom of what’s causing the problem.
You may need to talk to someone to figure this out, especially if stress is showing up in overwhelm, as it’s hard to see the wood for the trees.
If this is the case for you then you might be interested in my short course as a first step. Take a look here.
2. Be honest with yourself.
It’s sometimes tough to accept how you feel about a situation, but accepting if something is not working is the first step to making those changes.
3. Don’t be hard on yourself.
We all have times in our lives when we have to stop and review where we are, it’s part of life, whether that’s with our work or personal life.
4. Review your life and lifestyle.
Are there changes you can make or good habits you can introduce which will help? Are you heading in a direction that you are happy with?
5. Decide what you can change.
Although it may feel impossible at first, there will be things you can change. Start with small changes you can make right away and work up to the big things. Remember, sometimes those minor changes can solve the problem.
6. Look after yourself physically
This is so important, often when we are stressed it affects our sleep, which leads to making poor choices in food and exercise. Making one positive change at a time means we are more able to deal with the stressful situation.
Maybe you know you want something different but are feeling stuck in a current situation because you feel you don’t have the time or energy or confidence to make a change?
If you have recognised that there are areas of your work or life that are making you feel stressed and you feel that you need support, then book a call discovery call here.
Together, we can explore whether coaching could help.